Dickens and Empire

Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens

Grace Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Dickens and Empire offers a reevaluation of Charles Dickens's imaginative engagement with the British Empire throughout his career. Employing postcolonial theory alongside readings of Dickens's novels, journalism and personal correspondence, it explores his engagement with Britain's imperial holdings as imaginative spaces onto which he offloaded a number of pressing domestic and personal problems, thus creating an entangled discourse between race and class. Drawing upon a wealth of primary material, it offers a radical reassessment of the writer's stance on racial matters. In the past Dickens has been dismissed as a dogged and sustained racist from the 1850s until the end of his life; but here author Grace Moore reappraises The Noble Savage, previously regarded as a racist tract. Examining it side by side with a series of articles by Lord Denman in The Chronicle, which condemned the staunch abolitionist Dickens as a supporter of slavery, Moore reveals that the tract is actually an ironical riposte. This finding facilitates a review and reassessment of Dickens's controversial outbursts during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, and demonstrates that his views on racial matters were a good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested. Moore's analysis of a number of pre- and post-Mutiny articles calling for reform in India shows that Dickens, as their publisher, would at least have been aware of the grievances of the Indian people, and his journal's sympathy toward them is at odds with his vitriolic responses to the insurrection. This first sustained analysis of Dickens and his often problematic relationship to the British Empire provides fresh readings of a number of Dickens texts, in particular A Tale of Two Cities. The work also presents a more complicated but balanced view of one of the most famous figures in Victorian literature.

Chapter 1
Emigration, Transportation, and the Problem of Closure

‘One of the strangest things about the advance of England is the many-sided character of the form of early settlement: Central North America we plant with Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of our whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia with our transported Felons’.¹

One of Dickens’s earliest engagements with the colonies was through the issue of emigration, both as a device to facilitate narrative closure and, of course as a very real solution for large numbers of working-class men and women throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, it is perhaps in this banishment of the poor to distant shores that we may find the origins of the displacement process that frequently led Dickens to employ a colonial discourse when discussing the otherness of the urban poor. In his early works the Empire was little more than a useful repository to contain a number of social problems, and this usage does not differ significantly from the official government policy of ‘shovelling out paupers’, which led to the emergence of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission in 1847.² As Patrick Brantlinger has noted:

In the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from scenes of domestic conflict.³

One of the major factors behind the nineteenth-century fascination with the distant Empire was the improvement in both land transportation and steam shipping, which made travel to the colonies cheaper and easier than ever before. Large-scale crises such as the Irish famine also brought the emigration issue to the fore, as an efficient means of dealing with the immediate results of social problems, rather than the causes.

Asa Briggs neatly encapsulates the acceleration of emigration in lieu of domestic reform when he states, ‘In 1815 less than two thousand persons left the British Isles: in 1830 the figure was over 55,000; by the late 1840s and early ’50s more than a quarter of a million emigrants were leaving in single years’.⁴ Dickens himself was complicit in the promotion of this exodus, as is evidenced through his involvement with the Urania Cottage project of his friend the heiress, Angela Burdett Coutts. The scheme involved the reclamation and rehabilitation of young women—usually ‘fallen’—who were attempting to leave a life of crime behind them. For Dickens, the removal of the women to new shores was an integral part of the rehabilitation process. As he stated rather ironically in a letter to W.J. Broderip in 1850:

I assist my friend Miss Coutts in the management of a small private Institution she maintains for reclaiming young women, instructing them in all sound domestic knowledge, and sending them out to Australia or elsewhere.

We don’t consider a Magdalen qualification indispensable, but we don’t object to it, and we are glad (when we are not full) to receive any reasonably hopeful case of distress or offence. We would prefer not to have them beyond twenty years of age, and we impress upon them that Emigration is an essential part of our compact.⁵

In stressing the importance of emigration to his scheme, Dickens exhibits the same impatience with governmental irresponsibility toward the underclass that he would display in the novels of the mid-1850s, with the refrain that the state of the nation was ‘nobody’s fault’. It is obvious that he regards emigration as a vital component of the redemptive process, and it is important to ask why this should be the case. It would appear that in Dickens’s mind these women could only be completely rehabilitated if they were removed from the ‘corrupting’ elements present in industrial Britain, and the stigma that would be attached to them as ‘fallen’ women. Such a stance presents an interesting paradox when juxtaposed with the prohibition imposed by society against the return of convicts. In Dickens’s imagination such less-than-desirable elements seem to inhabit a bizarre dual position as both symptoms of the shortcomings of society and also contributors to the cause of its decay. In either case their return was to be secured against.

Little government assistance existed for those who wished to start afresh in the colonies, and for the poorest emigration was simply not an option unless they could find assistance from charitable organizations. Although the vast majority of emigrants funded their ventures themselves, associations such as the social reformer Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonization Loan Society did offer a limited degree of support to candidates who were considered industrious enough to recoup the cost of a loan. As a ‘Chips’ article from Household Words notes, Chisholm’s society offered, ‘a self-supporting system of emigration, for assisting industrious people, and for promoting practically the spread of sound moral principles in a much neglected colony’.⁶ A rigorous screening procedure was in operation before loans were allocated, and to prove their commitment to the venture, would-be participants were required to pay half of their fare in advance through weekly or monthly instalments. Mrs Chisholm was extremely outspoken on the neglect of the British underclass, and recognized that to remove some of the sufferers would be a more efficient and humane solution than waiting for the government to take action:

Whether I look to Ireland or to Scotland, the first view is one of a very harrowing character,—ghastly beings obstruct my vision; and when I consider the modes of belief which have been adopted to remedy this appalling misery—the anxious solicitude of the paternal Government—the long debates in both Houses of Parliament,—and the subject increases in difficulty, and magnifies in proportion.⁷

Here Chisholm identifies the bureaucratic forces of circumlocution that impede reform through discussion instead of action, and her tone is remarkably similar to the stance Dickens was to adopt during the 1850s. Although he was later to lampoon Chisholm as the feckless telescopic philanthropist, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, Dickens was actively involved in her scheme and collaborated with her on the ‘Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’ that appeared in the first issues of Household Words. The letters, which claimed to be authentic, are a testament to the bourgeois self-help ethos espoused by Dickens. As the preamble to the bundle states:

The design [of the Colonization Loan Society] is based, in the main, upon three positions. First, “That it is melancholy to reflect that thousands of British subjects should wander about, more like spectres than beings of flesh and blood; and that hundreds should die from starvation, while our vast colonies could provide abundantly for them”. Secondly, “that in England a society is much needed, the great moral aim of which should be to check crime, by protecting and encouraging virtue”. Thirdly, “that the zealous endeavours of the charitable, combined with the industrious and frugal efforts of the working classes themselves” could accomplish great ends in the way of emigration.⁸

Of course, as the historian David Thomson has pointed out, ‘The ‘push’ was always more important than the ‘pull’, and it was frequently those individuals, for example, industrial workers during the ‘hungry forties’, who were least equipped for the pioneer existence who wanted to resettle.⁹ The Irish potato famine of 1845-1851 also caused a mass exodus, as the Irish sought better lives in other British colonies, and in North America. As early as 1842, though, Dickens highlighted the American dependence upon Irish labour in his American Notes:

It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and countrywomen of these two [Irish] labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement! [AN 81, my brackets]

Leon Litvack helpfully reminds us that in this consideration of pre-famine emigration, the Irish labourer is characterized as honest and hard-working, the very linchpins of the New World.¹⁰ Not all emigrants were as useful as the manual workers described here, though. In January 1850 Reynolds’ Newspaper issued a dire warning to potential colonists that they would be ‘ten thousand times more miserable when turned adrift in some colony at the end of the world’¹¹ than if they remained in the mother country, and indeed, Dickens seems to subscribe to a similar opinion, as early as 1843, in Martin Chuzzlewit when Martin and the relentlessly jolly Mark Tapley travel to America to seek their fortunes.¹² The novel’s narrator highlights the problem of the unskilled emigrant when he describes a group of starving failed settlers:

There they were, all huddled together with the engine and the fires. Farmers who had never seen a plough; woodmen who had never used an axe; builders who couldn’t make a box; cast out of their own land, with not a hand to aid them; newly come into an unknown world, children in helplessness, but men in wants, with younger children at their backs, to live or die as it might happen. [MC 372]

Martin Chuzzlewit shows the life of the emigrant to be a perilous existence of drudgery and toil, based upon delusion and deliberate deception on the part of a nation wishing to free itself from the burden of the poor. The voice of Mr Bevan, who urges Martin to speak out on the plight of the misguided settlers on his escape from the Eden settlement, may here be equated with Dickens’s own stance on emigration:

If you ever become a rich man, or a powerful one you shall try to make your Government more careful of its subjects when they roam abroad to live. Tell it what you know of emigration in your own case, and impress upon it how much suffering may be prevented with a little pains! [MC 546-7].

Here Bevan emphasizes the danger of allowing emigrants to embark on a journey into the unknown with little or no awareness of the hardships that will greet them in the new country. Bevan’s views here are likely to have been inspired by Dickens’s first visit to America (22 January to 7 June 1842), where, on his passage home, he witnessed at first hand the ‘little world of poverty’ of the unsuccessful emigrants, many of whom had sold their clothes in order to raise money for their passage home. He cautioned:

The whole system of shipping and conveying these unfortunate persons, is one that stands in need of thorough revision. If any class deserve to be protected and assisted by the Government, it is that class who are banished from their native land in search of the bare means of subsistence…The law is bound, at least upon the English side, to see that too many of them are not put on board one ship: and that their accommodations are decent; not demoralising and profligate. It is bound, too, in common humanity, to declare that no man shall be taken on board without his stock of provisions being previously inspected by some proper officer, and pronounced moderately sufficient for his support upon the voyage. [AN 223-224]

Dickens here points to the moral responsibility incumbent upon the government to ensure that prospective emigrants did not transport themselves to even deeper misery than they were attempting to flee. However, in spite of his warnings, and as many of the Household Words articles testify, Dickens did advocate relocation for the industrious as a rapid means of alleviating suffering, but only when it could be regulated by a competent and responsible organization.

Notwithstanding his involvement with projects like Urania House, by 1850 Dickens’s narrative approach toward emigration had undergone a definite shift. As an artist dealing with, and at times breaking away from, the constraints of realist fiction, Dickens had become troubled by the problem of ending. The critic Deirdre David has examined what she refers to as ‘fictions of resolution’, and posits: ‘Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, each in his or her own historical and artistic province, cre...